Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A Great War Pilckem Ridge operations M.C. group of seven awarded to Acting Major E. E. King, 16th (Cardiff City) Battalion, Welsh Regiment

Military Cross, G.V.R., unnamed as issued; 1914-15 Star (Capt., Welsh R.); British War and Victory Medals, M.I.D. oak leaf (Major); Defence Medal 1939-45; Jubilee 1935; Coronation 1937, mounted court-style as worn, generally good very fine (7) £800-1000

M.C. London Gazette 26 September 1917: ‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He displayed untiring energy in his efforts to maintain forward dumps by means of mule convoy, repeatedly passing through the enemy’s barrage to being up fresh supplies. It was due to his initiative and fearlessness that the forward brigade dump was able to meet all demands of units throughout the operations.’

Mention in despatches London Gazette 5 July 1919.

Ernest Errington King was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant into the 16th (Cardiff City) Battalion, Welsh Regiment in December 1914 and first went to France at the end of the following year, where the Battalion was assigned to the Neuve Chapelle sector.

From then until June 1916, the Welshmen held in turn various frontline positions at Givenchy, Festubert and Laventie, gaining a ‘thorough knowledge of trench warfare’, but in the subsequent Somme operations of July 1916, the Battalion sustained around 300 casualties in the bloody assault on Mametz Wood on the 7th. Attacking towards the “Hammerhead” feature, the Welshmen were soon swept by machine-gun fire from the wood ahead, and from the Flatiron and Sabot Copses, but still managed to obtain significant gains, which were gallantly held, over several ‘terrible days and nights’, in the face of ferocious enemy counter-attacks.

King remained on regular frontline duties with the Battalion until early 1917 - latterly as 2nd in command in the rank of Acting Major - when he was posted to Brigade H.Q. for Staff Officer duties, but, as evidenced by his subsequent award of the M.C., he remained in close contact with his old unit, not least in the attack launched against Pilckem Ridge on 31 July 1917, when the Battalion again made valuable gains, and held them until relieved six days later - a successful outcome no doubt assisted by King’s gallantry in bringing up vital supplies under constant enemy bombardment. It was about this time that a fellow Cardiff City Battalion officer, Captain H. Morrey Salmon, photographed King standing in a captured German trench.

Subsequently mentioned in Sir Douglas Haig’s despatch dated 16 March 1919, for services in the period September 1918 until March 1919, King retained the rank of substantive Captain on relinquishing his commission in the latter year.